Andromeda fans, front and centre.

POSTED BY: Cybersnark
UPDATED: Thursday, January 11, 2007 03:34
VIEWED: 6664
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CYBERSNARK

Friday, June 30, 2006 2:52 PM

I'm a little late on this, but:

After three years of effort, Jill ("writergroupie") Sherwin has released Sailing the Slipstream: An Unofficial and Unauthorized guide to Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda. I've been watching the development over on ExIsle ( http://www.exisle.net/mb/index.php?showtopic=25394), where many of Andromeda's (pre-Fall) writers hang out (including Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who approaches Joss-like levels of talent). The book includes multitudinous interviews, observations, episode-by-episode reviews, and various other pretties. It's also purple, which, as all true Andromeda fans know, is the perfect colour.

Also, and critically, Jill did this book on her own time, meaning that this represents three years of avoiding other paying gigs and living hand-to-mouth. It was done for no other reason than pure love of what the show was, and sadness over what happened to it (and desire to understand how it went wrong, so that these situations might be better avoided in the future). Both are sentiments that we Browncoats should be intimately familiar with.

I repeat again, that she was doing this on her own expense. Books are now up for ordering on http://www.writergroupie.com/slipstream.htm. Ordering process is a little involved, but hey, we're fans, and sometimes fans have to cut corners.

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We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.

BLUEMOONSTUFF

Friday, June 30, 2006 3:11 PM

I stopped watching after Tranz turned from Purple to Gold. And, of course, she lost her tail. I think it was the tail that did it for me. Gotta love a chick with a purple tail.

The local staions started moving it around the schedule alot also so it was hard to find some times. I bought the first few DVD's but they were a little too pricey to keep buyin'. It was a good show until that random gunfire took a perfectly good tail.

I'll check out the book. Thanks for the Link!

BMS

An Original Browncoat - Member since September 20, 2002

Wearables • Writeables • Stickables
Fancible shiny goods made by a Browncoat for Browncoats
http://www.bluemoonstuff.com/Firefly_Serenity/fireflyserenity.html

CYBERSNARK

Friday, June 30, 2006 4:21 PM

Actually:

Select to view spoiler:

Argument's been made that Trance staged the tail-ectomy. It was getting her recognized, and she wasn't ready to be identified yet.

http://www.rhwolfe.com/Insider%20Info.htm Last set of links on the page reveal Trance's secrets.

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We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.

BLUEMOONSTUFF

Friday, June 30, 2006 5:06 PM

From the eps I did see after that fiasco she did seem to have a World of responsibilties, literaly.

I'll have to see if it's in reruns anywhere. Be nice to see it in order though. So what did bcome of Harper? Did he end up blowing the Universe to bits by the end of the show? How about Trance, back to Purple maybe? Ohhh, the Purple.

Any good Andro boards for me to troll and catch up on stuff?

BMS

An Original Browncoat - Member since September 20, 2002

Wearables • Writeables • Stickables
Fancible shiny goods made by a Browncoat for Browncoats
http://www.bluemoonstuff.com/Firefly_Serenity/fireflyserenity.html

SAB39

Friday, June 30, 2006 5:45 PM

This thread is interesting to me because I only discovered Andromeda at the beginning of the last season. Not that anyone ever bothered to mention that it was the last season or anything, or that the last episode was even the last episode. The story just ended, and the next week was a rerun. But hey, I'm not bitter.

Anyway, the point is that coming into the show at that point, I actually liked it. A lot of humor, some ambiguity to the morals of the characters... of course this was before I discovered Firefly but that wasn't something I was used to at the time.

So can someone give me the backstory here? What was it that was good about the show originally that got destroyed, and how did that happen? And am I completely crazy for liking the last season?

(and is the whole thing available on DVD so I can find out? ;) )

ETA:

Quote:
Originally posted by bluemoonstuff:
So what did bcome of Harper? Did he end up blowing the Universe to bits by the end of the show?

He built himself a lovebot. Or something.

CHOO1701

Friday, June 30, 2006 5:57 PM

is it me or was Harpe a cheap Wash lookie likey?

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"Remember, always be yourself. Unless you suck."-Joss Whedon

ITES RULE!!!!

CYBERSNARK

Friday, June 30, 2006 8:50 PM

Actually, Wash was a cheap Harper look-alike (technically, since Andromeda was around first).

Yes, all seasons of Andromeda are out on DVD (as far as I know; I know 1-4 are out, and I'm assuming S5 should have been out by now). I haven't actually seen S5, because Global (the Canadian version of Fox) stopped airing it and, by then, I didn't care enough to track it down.

I think the best Andromeda-related board that survives is ExIsle ( http://www.exisle.net/mb/index.php?s=9bff5eccb48901d3aeaaebce4dc28ac6&
act=idx) It's not exactly an "Andromeda" board so much as a general SF board, but a goodly number of Drom alums hang out there.

As for what it was like originally, Dylan's in-character opening narration said it best:

The Long Night has come.
The Systems Commonwealth, the greatest civilization in history, has fallen.

But now, one ship --one crew-- has vowed to drive back the Night, and rekindle the light of civilization.
On the starship Andromeda, hope lives again.

What drew me to it, personally, was the intricately-built universe (the various fiefdoms resulting from the Commonwealth's collapse, the Seekers of the Way, the Nietzschean splinter factions, the drift colonies and slipstream corridors), the aliens who were actually alien (the communal, insectoid yet not-hive-minded Than, the parasitic Magog, the totally materialistic [in the sense of rejecting anything not rooted in physical truth] Nietzscheans, the pan-spiritual Wayists, the literally multi-facetted ship's AI), the scientific roots (quantum physics, string theory, most of the "aliens" being genengineered offshoots of humans, time dilation, time lags in sublight communications, the lack of forcefields, the use of fullerenes and common-place nanotechnology), the unconventionality (the Commonwealth wasn't created by humans, and functioned for several millennia without our presence, Earth is a bombed-out wasteland and no-one cares), and the ensemble cast of fascinating, multifacetted characters, most of them harbouring major secrets in their background that make Shepherd Book look forthright.

As the show went on, the producers tried to tinker with it, turning it from an intelligent drama to a mindless action/adventure hour (one Usenet poster described it as "action-porn"). The writing staff was fired one by one (starting with RHW, who'd pretty much created everything short of the lead character's name), the "ensemble cast" turned into "a star and a supporting cast," two of the actors left (one unavoidably, I'll grant, due to medical issues), and Trance was retconned from "a mystery wrapped in a riddle with a tail in the middle" to a gold-tinged Xena wannabe (then re-retconned into a wizard).

Jill's book explains it far better than I can (as was the point of her writing it).

It's an ongoing debate as to which show got off worse: Firefly, which was mangled and cancelled outright, or Andromeda, which was hijacked, flown into the ground, then drawn out into a five-year trainwreck.

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We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.

CALHOUN

Friday, June 30, 2006 10:20 PM

Andromeda started out with potential, the first couple of seasons had some decent episodes then it went downhill fast! It got so crappy that it became the only sci fi show I wont watch! The acting is horrible and the writing absolute garbage!

Quote:
Cybersnark wrote:
Friday, June 30, 2006 04:52
(including Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who approaches Joss-like levels of talent).

How dare you insult Joss like this!!!

PFFT!!

CYBERSNARK

Saturday, July 1, 2006 3:29 PM

The badness stems from two sources:

* Producers/network suits not letting RHW do his job.
* RHW being fired mid-S2. We were left with various people trying to be RHW, who were themselves fired and replaced with talentless-yet-malleable peons to the suits' wishes.

Check out the pilot to see how Wolfe could make a fully-masked supporting character/token redshirt casualty demonstrate more personality than the leads of some shows, using nothing more than dialogue and the actress' delivery.

Aside from the whole "being an alien" thing (and the career-military thing), Refractions of Dawn would fit right in among our BDHs. Probably be a good replacement for Wash.

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We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.

RELFEXIVE

Sunday, July 2, 2006 4:13 PM

There were a lot of good things in Andromeda at the beginning. It had a few dodgy eps (what series doesn't?) but it had a strong background, interesting characters, good plots and a fairly solid arc (eventually).

Then they changed it when RHW left/resigned/was fired/ran away screaming in horror/whatever the truth is. You could feel the slipping at the end of season two, and after the first few eps of season three I was sat there gaping thinking "what the frell have they done?!"

Then it was occasionally good albeit in a rough-hewn, simplistic way. Oh, and they abandoned/messed with/screwed up the arc by forgetting about the incoming Magog worldship 95% of the time. And by confusing the Trance's people choosing the Commonwealth to fight against the Magog thing, too, by having the Chosen Defenders blasted to bits by the freaky other-dimension aliens/Pyrians/Great Tyr Betrayal.

I've not seen past the end of season three yet, literally and psychologically; I'm not sure I want to. Are the following seasons actually worth seeing at all?

It's a great shame, really.

"My God - you're like a trained ape. Without the training."
"Come a day there won't be room for naughty men like us to slip about at all..."
"SUMMER!!"
http://www.theshadowdepository.co.uk/index.htm

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